Guest Dive Report

CWK was sick with the sniffles this weekend (not contagious, huh Jeff!?), and being the good husband that I am,... I went out diving at Lobos. Twice :P

As an aside, if somebody ever tells you, "I'm sick, but it's not contagious", don't believe them. Seriously. Being sick, aside from sucking in general, pretty much rules out diving unless it is paired with bountiful amounts of sudafed. At this point, we're probably on some kind of Walgreen's meth-lab watchlist :P

Anyway, back to the point... So I figured that I'd write up a guest dive report for the weekend's diving, since it was a great couple days of diving. To frame the context, here was the CDIP forecast on Wed. afternoon:



For those who don't follow these things on a regular basis, this is good. Really good.

Anyway, on Saturday, I met up with a bunch of the 5thd-x crowd, who had something like 8 of the 15 reservations for the day between them) at Lobos. After some doddling and chatting, we broke up into dive teams and I ended up diving with Ben. We discussed the plan which was, roughly, to head over to Granite Point Wall and explore (neither of us had been out there before).

We headed over there and played around in the cove and along the wall and followed the wall up and around and (I'm pretty sure) wound up swimming and and out of the cutouts that define the Granite Point Pinnacles. This is a pretty cool area. The rock formations and sheer walls are neat, and especially so with the excellent vis. that we enjoyed that day (I'd say 40-60'). At one point, we looked up from 60FSW and could see the waves breaking on the surface, and another 30-40' down to the sand.

The rocks here are covered in invertebrate life, most notably corynactis, hydrocoral, and various encrusting tunicates and sponges. We also found a nice little crystal jelly (Aequorea victoria) in mid-water. We got a little confused on the way in and mistook some rock formations and a sand channel for a spot on the southern end of middle reef. I played around with the scooter for awhile and then we thumbed it, doubling the stops for a 10min trip to the surface.

Pictures from the day can be found in the BAUE gallery.

104 min, 73 ft (60ft avg), 48deg


Dive 2 was doing skills in whaler's and some more scooter play.


We had our own Lobos ticket for Sunday, but with Allison sick, I teamed up with John and Anibal. The plan was to do a skills dive to drill some skills (and failures) for John's upcoming Tech1 signoff. We spent about an hour working on various skills and then headed in.

Anibal sat out dive 2 due to some back problems, but John and I decided that it was simply too nice out to forego a second dive. I had about 120cf of gas left and John had about 160cf (damn those 104's are big), so we decided to head for Beto's Reef via hole-in-the-wall and the Lone Metridium. We headed out and dropped near the mouth of whaler's and kicked out for about 20min. It turns out, we were heading a bit more westerly than we intended, and wound up touring 3 sisters.

I'd been out to 3 sisters once before with Paul Lee, but this time we got to spend a little longer and cover each of the sisters. The rock is sparser on the sisters than elsewhere in Lobos, but the hydrocoral (espcially the smaller stalks) cover is impressive. Other highlights include a sizeable elephant-ear sponge (on the 1st sister I think...) and a lonely red gorgonian in about 120FSW.

I had to turn the dive sooner than I would have liked due to gas, so we retraced our steps and headed back. We stopped over and checked out some familiar spots on middle-reef on the way out, and then did a nice slow beach ascent.

63min, 100' (80' avg depth), 48deg.


It was a nice weekend of diving, but (believe it or not), I did feel bad for leaving Allison at home. I'm looking forward to having her back for Lobos again this Saturday.